Behold I just discovered a 3rd one. You said, “high degree of certainty” You are trusting in a high degree of certainty, not absolute certainty and that requires faith.

Its not faith at all. Its an educated conclusion based on observation and evidence. Let me explain the difference. Lets say there is a stone on a platform with a trap door below it. I open the trap door and the stone falls to the surface below. I do this a thousand times, maybe ten thousand times and every time the same thing happens. You now ask me what i think will happen when you open the door for the 10,001th time. My educated opinion based on 10,000 observations is that the stone will fall to the surface below. Can i be absolutely certain of that? No but I can have a high degree of certainty. Someone can come along and challenge my opinion but they would need some extraordinary evidence to convince me otherwise ( ie. They could show me there is an electromagnet under the table which has been switched on and provide some evidence that the stone has magnetic properties so that this time it would actually be propelled upwards)

Faith is a very different thing. Someone with faith would see the stone fall 10,000 times just as I did but when they were told by someone in authority ( a priest maybe? a vision of god?) that the next time the trap door opened the stone would be propelled upward and a unicorn would appear in the spot where the stone had been they would believe it. They would believe it not because there was any evidence at all to support that conclusion but because they had faith. Its a very different concept.

Faith is something thats held on to by people who need definite answers and can’t live with the uncertainty of the universe around us. Science is a slow process. It may be hundreds or millions of years before we have all the answers. We may not even be smart enough to ever figure it all out, but science has done an incredible job of illuminating things that were once mysterious and thought to be the work of magical forces. I’m willing to accept some holes in my knowledge for now while we work out the rest. Thats not faith. Its a reasonable conclusion based on what I’ve observed so far. In the contest to explain the universe the score is currently SCIENCE: Billions, god: zero, but you never know. Maybe god will come down and do a bunch of miracles at the last minute and we’ll have to go into overtime. That is assuming the flying spaghetti monster doesn’t beat him to it.

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For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious,.... and just plain wrong

Traveler,
You proved my point- you have made statements showing you believe in eternal matter- a matter of faith in matter. I prefer a belief in eternal Deity.

I never said i believe in eternal matter. I follow the logic regarding the age of the universe and there seems plenty of evidence to support the conclusion that matter has been around since the universe began, but as doug already said, we don’t know what happened before that. I can see matter. I know it exists. I see no evidence for a deity eternal or otherwise.

What i said is that there seems to be plenty of evidence that Mindless matter can give rise to mindful beings and i stand by that.

You need to read my posts more carefully and stop cherry picking a few words here and there out of context to try and make a point.

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For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious,.... and just plain wrong

I’ve responded to yours several times. Perhaps you have not read some of my post. Anyway a response to you follows-

For emergence to work on matter first you must have matter. So we are back to 1 of 2 faiths. One believes in eternal, mindless matter or that person believes in eternal Deity.
Nice try. Keep working on it. Maybe out there somewhere you’ll find a 3rd possibility.

I’ve read every one of your posts. The problem is that your responses are not responses. You don’t answer my questions or respond to my arguments you just post a new talking point. Thats not a response. Many others have posted on here and you have completely ignored them even when they ask you questions you should be able to easily answer if there is any basis for your position.

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For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious,.... and just plain wrong

One can only hope s/he is gone, probably declaring him/herself the winner to any fundie who is willing to hear about how ‘stupid’ those atheists are…which was just his/her objective, not to learn or even share…

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Church; where sheep congregate to worship a zombie on a stick that turns into a cracker on Sundays…

Boobs just can’t be explained, therefore God is real!!!! That is the new thesis we evos must defend.

Mammals suck, therefore God is imperfect. How’s that?

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As a fabrication of our own consciousness, our assignations of meaning are no less “real”, but since humans and the fabrications of our consciousness are routinely fraught with error, it makes sense, to me, to, sometimes, question such fabrications.